Waking from Hibernation

After a very busy Jannuary I finally have some more time to work on simon again. Do expect more updates than usual from me this month :)

The first week(s) I will be working on getting the Akonadi integration in simon up and running. Using this new plugin you will be able to schedule simon commands on specific dates / times using your conventional groupware infrastructure.
For example, you can use simons dialog system to wake you up in the morning by scheduling an event in KOrganizer with a special (but configurable) prefix in the events summary: By default "[simon-command] Dialog/Welcome" would execute the welcome dialog at the start time of the event in your calendar.

The Akonadi plugin also provides the option to react on other, "normal" events by displaying a reminder about them - again by using the dialog system. This is meant as a replacement of the korganizer reminder system for voice controlled systems.

You can even use the Akonadi plugin to schedule command executions from within simon.

The dialog system has been spruced up and now sports support for user avatars and multiple texts per state (one will be randomly selected during execution to make the system feel a bit more natural).

Other than that I will also be working - again - on improving our speech model creation technique and have also been assigned to have a look at some problems in ssc / sscd again that seem to creep up in the windows version.

The other parts of our Benefit project are also progressing well and we will be starting the first prototyping tests within the next couple of weeks. I hope I can get some video demonstrations done before the end of the month.

Of course, next to all that serious business I couldn't resist to hack around a bit and developed a tiny proof of concept that demonstrates a novel approach on how to deal with false positives in a speech recognition system that will basically running 24 / 7.

The prototype uses opencv and the webcam of my notebook and runs a simple face detection on the current image. If no person is found sitting in front of the laptop and looking at its screen, simon is automatically disabled. As soon as the user looks at the computer again, the system is re-activated.

This is just a proof of concept at this stage but is already working quite well. I hope to extend this into a regular simon plugin that could use simons filter system to toggle recognition for simon 0.4. Yes, we are going multimodal :)